Re: Clustering for Performance

Thank you Geoff and Andrew for you swift responses.

We are actually looking for a consultant to come in and help with this.
However I am just doing some ground work beforehand.

I was hoping that SQL Server 2005 would give us some performance
improvements (such as true Load Balancing like Oracle Real Application
Clusters), but the improvements over 2000 seem to be mostly for failover
rather than scaling.

Thanks again for your input

Richard

"Andrew J. Kelly" wrote:

> Richard,
>
> Try not to take this the wrong way but if you are asking questions like
> these and need to implement a system that large you are probably a bit over
> your head. I suggest you seriously consider hiring a consultant who has
> been thru things like this before. Quite honestly there aren't many people
> who have dealt with systems that large. And if not done correctly it will
> almost certainly turn belly up and die when you even get close to that many
> users. That said here are a few comments. One is I doubt you will really
> have 40K concurrent users especially since SQL Server only allows 32,767<g>.
> Even with heavy use web based apps you rarely have as many concurrent
> connections as you would think. And if you are talking anywhere near this
> amount you are talking some serious hardware to support it. As I mentioned
> in another post Clustering is not a load balancing option. Only one node at
> a time has control over a specific disk resource in the cluster. So even
> with Active / Active (or more correctly Multi-Instance) you can't share a
> database since it resides on only one disk resource. You can't design a
> system like this in a newsgroup and if you try you will fail. It requires a
> very careful and well laid out plan to implement a large scale database
> application.
>
> --
> Andrew J. Kelly SQL MVP
>
>
> "Richard" <Richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:A115E5ED-8801-4142-B921-FD25665FE3C0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > Hello All. I need to set up quite a large SQL System 2005 system that
> > needs
> > to deal with 40,000 concurrent users, and one of the tables will contain
> > blob
> > data. 40,000 users throwing around Mb's of data at the same time worries
> > me a
> > little bit!
> >
> > My question is to do with Database Clustering and Mirroring. From what I
> > can
> > see, there is still no load-balancing with SQL Server 2005, so does this
> > mean
> > even in a clustered environment I am still basically only using a single
> > database server? I have seen many posts that tell me that clustering is
> > ONLY
> > for failover and not for performance. I understand that with
> > Active/Passive
> > this is the case, but how about Active/Active? If I can set up
> > Active/Active
> > (2 nodes? 4 nodes? 8 nodes? how many are possible?) with a SAN and NOT
> > have
> > failover implemented (can I turn failover off?) then would I have a load
> > balanced environment? I could then have all nodes running up to 100%
> > (because
> > I don't have to worry about the failover) and therefore give me a dramatic
> > increase in performance compared with using a single server?
> >
> > If I can do this then I can set up 2 identical clusters and an extra
> > server
> > for the witness, and use database mirroring for failover? Of course I
> > understand that mirroring will decrease performance on the clusters. But
> > would this give me a super-fast database system that might cope with what
> > I
> > need?
> >
> > Also, I am thinking about taking the blob data of of the database and
> > create
> > a new database that just deals with the blobs. How would this affect my
> > clustered/mirrored environment?
> >
> > Thanks
> >
> > Richard
>
>
>
.

Relevant Pages

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